other provinces without number being once more, after so long an
interval, reduced beneath the sway of Rome by victories granted
by Heaven, and themselves bearing witness to our dominion. All
peoples too are ruled by laws which we have either enacted or
arranged. Having removed every inconsistency from the sacred
constitutions, hitherto inharmonious and confused, we extended
our care to the immense volumes of the older jurisprudence; and,
like sailors crossing the mid-ocean, by the favour of Heaven have
now completed a work of which we once despaired. When this,
with God's blessing, had been done, we called together that dis-
tinguished man Tribonian, master and ex-quaestor of our sacred
palace, and the illustrious Theophilus and Dorotheus, professors
of law, of whose ability, legal knowledge, and trusty observance
of our orders we have received many and genuine proofs, and
especially commissioned them to compose by our authority and
advice a book of Institutes, whereby you may be enabled to
learn your first lessons in law no longer from ancient fables, but
to grasp them by the brilliant light of imperial learning, and that
your ears and minds may receive nothing useless or incorrect,
but only what holds good in actual fact. And thus whereas in
past time even the foremost of you were unable to read the
imperial constitutions until after four years, you, who have been
so honoured and fortunate as to receive both the beginning and
the end of your legal teaching from the mouth of the Emperor,
can now enter on the study of them without delay. After the
completion therefore of the fifty books of the Digest or Pandects,
in which all the earlier law has been collected by the aid of the
said distinguished Tribonian and other illustrious and most able
men, we directed the division of these same Institutes into four
books, comprising the first elements of the whole science of law.